Credit

Caption

Chitin structure. X-ray crystallography diffraction pattern obtained as part of research to determine the structure of the biological polymer chitin, found in animals such as insects and crustaceans. This image, from a crab sample, is by British biophysicist Anthony North while a student at the MRC Biophysics Research Unit at King's College London, UK. It was here in the early 1950s that Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and other crystallographers obtained X-ray diffraction patterns for DNA that led to James Watson and Francis Crick's DNA double helix model. As well as DNA, the King's College researchers investigated other materials.